Samenvatting

Background: Acupuncture is one of the most frequently used alternative interventions in the course of treatment for chronic low back pain (cLBP). Design: Literature Review Search Strategy: The research team conducted a search of the computerized bibliographic databases available (Cochrane, Cinahl, GoogleSchoolar, Pubmed, PiCarta) to find a sufficient amount of relevant articles. Selection Criteria: All articles first had to pass the inclusion and exclusion criteria to show a relevance with our research topic. The researchers ended up with a list of 35 articles, meeting the inclusion criteria. These were read and graded by the criteria list designed by the research team. After this, 15 articles with good rankings were selected to be included. Data Selection and analysis: The 15 articles are published between 1986 and 2008 (Mean 2002, 53).All of them focused on various forms of acupuncture as an alternative intervention for cLBP.5 of them also compared the intervention to conservative treatments (physiotherapy, exercise etc.) as a control. Results: 12 articles have according to our criteria list good quality and 3 are of moderate quality. 9 of these studies showed significant changes in pain intensity by for e.g. VAS scale, 5 showed the best improvement with Acupuncture as an adjunctive to conventional therapies. 1 of the studies had no, inconclusive or neglectable outcome. Discussion: Our research, as well as the articles reviewed, showed confounding factors which mostly were seen in too small sample sizes, interferences in the study protocols due to high drop-out or low follow up, what respectively causes problems in drawing conclusions about long-term effect. Conclusion: This study makes visible that acupuncture in general has an effect as an adjunctive tool in the course of treatment for chronic LBP patients, but there is only low evidence that it exceeds placebo in general, although it seems to be superior to other available alternative interventions, for e.g. TENS. Recommendation for the future could be that more RCT’s with a strict, but pragmatic study protocol and bigger sample sizes need to be conducted.